


Trojan Horse

by aurora_borealis



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-06 02:59:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11591520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurora_borealis/pseuds/aurora_borealis
Summary: Edriss 562 is an unsettling presence in the life of Esplin 9466.





	Trojan Horse

**Author's Note:**

> Quotation marks used throughout rather than things such as angle-brackets due to formatting issues.

They are all young soldiers, and most want to be Edriss 562. 

It is not out of envy so much as admiration; that is what draws her peers to her. She does not yet hold a sort of rank that truly means status; neither do they. She is smart, and resourceful, and always speaks about the possibilities of the future- what could be found. 

Esplin 9466 does not want to be like her, nor does he understand her. There’s something- if not a specific secret, than a secret part of her- that she’s hiding, that hasn’t come to the surface but is just close enough to be detected, just barely.

“You’re very quiet,” she says to him one night. “Everyone else has been talking to me about what they think will be found next, what they’ll do, what awaits the homeworld. But you, I haven’t heard what you think.” No, he has his own acquaintances, and doesn’t see her as some kind of leader, at least not to him. He doesn’t hate her, not yet. 

The others don’t truly hate him yet, either. They do, however, think he is strange and imperious, but they humor him; when he speaks of his research in depth, mentioning specific Andalite cultural traditions and linguistic conventions and geographic statistics, it’s “oh, I didn’t know that, you’re the one who knows all that business,” a recognition but not quite respect of the intensity of the work. Someone once called him “War-Prince” sarcastically. 

“I’ve done a lot of research and I think some of what we know already may well have the greatest potential for us,” he tells her, a bit coldly; he knows the others see him as a specialist but don’t always respect his knowledge, and they see his physical performances in combat as imprecise, almost uncontrolled. But he gets the job done, and knows not everyone else can say that. Something gleams in her eyes.

“Dear,” she says dryly, and he is unsure if she is mocking his habit of calling those he dislikes “my dear,” often when they are not around. “You must be referring to the Andalites.” There’s an intensity in her voice, as if she’s ready for whatever situation, as if she’s made the preparations long ago. “You’ve spent a lot of time on them. Do you have any ideas?” she asks with a sort of genuine interest. 

Ideas…for what will happen, for what should happen, for what his opinions on them are, he isn’t sure what she’s asking and he doesn’t want to question her further. 

“I think,” he begins, “whatever happens, soon enough, we’ll have far more than mere ideas.” 

“You want something to happen, don’t you?” she asks. “Something unprecedented.” It’s not an accusation. Not in tone, at least. The self-assured intelligence in her face and voice is almost malicious, he thinks, like she’s wielding it. He supposes she’s right, he doesn’t even have a set particular idea of what exactly it is that he wants to happen, not yet, at least, though he has vague ideas. He doesn’t answer her, which she takes as answer enough. “You’re waiting, for something you’ve never seen, you don’t really know yet.”

“Are you?” he asks her, a hint of anger in his voice. 

“There will be challenges coming, and I await them, knowing they will have rewards,” she says, as if she can know, “I suppose we’re all waiting.” But she wasn’t talking about everyone. He doesn’t answer her, not when she says “you love it, don’t you?” not when she says, “you don’t admit much, but I know,” not when she walks away, but not before she says “all right, Esplin, keep waiting.” 

_

Sometimes her expertise on humans disgusts him, feels unnecessary to the point of being distasteful, but on a good day Esplin supposes it amuses him. Someone, he concedes, has to learn about these creatures if they are to be conquered; it is only that Edriss 562, Visser One, has taken it a bit far, if he is going to be honest. 

So when he mentioned offhandedly he would be appearing as a young human female- something he had never done before- she immediately began asking questions. Why? (He hadn’t given a real or complete answer, something about the Sharing and recruiting a particular human. She’d raised her eyebrows, but she hadn’t said much, likely her belief that he is a fool threw her off of his scheme.) Who? (He’d acquired multiple Controllers of the right ages and appearances, creating a human face that he felt would work for his purpose. The persona, he’d told her, was an acclaimed nature photographer who had just come back from an excursion in the deserts of Central Africa. “Oh, now you’ve researched the continents?” she’d condescended, a reference to how he previously confused South America with the southern region of the United States- which apparently only referred to the eastern part of the south, as the southern half of California was not considered “the south”. Yes, he’d wanted to tell her, o glorious Emperor Edriss of the Humans, keep mocking me for not being enamored with your planet that doesn’t even have the virtue of consistency.) 

“Well,” she’d said, “whatever it is you’re up to, I’ll find out soon enough. I won’t have you hinder my hard work by creating even more problems on Earth.” The truth was, he wasn’t sure if she’d find out what it was he set out to do, because he still wasn’t entirely sure what would happen once he would achieve the first stage of his plan.

“You had best be careful how you speak to me,” he seethes. 

“Oh, I will,” she says calmly. 

Elfangor’s boy is within reach. If he could get him to accept his “cousin’s” adoption, he could capture him, make him a Controller, kill him, get any and all information out of him about those hideous bandits, some of those things, all of them. But then what? Surely Elfangor’s son could give him more than just a body for some social-climbing underling that wouldn’t even appreciate it, more than a useful interrogation. If the boy accepted what his "cousin" offered at first, could there be no possibility of some sort of arrangement? The boy was young, he could be taught still, Esplin could make him useful, make a formidable assistant to the Empire, just as Elfangor was its worthy enemy. 

He- as Aria- and Edriss, in her sunglasses and old wig meant to disguise her host’s face, traverse through an empty department store in one of the shopping mall right over the Pool. It just opened about fourteen minutes ago, and it is a week day, so most of the humans are at work; it would be busier on the weekend. “I know what you think, Edriss,” he says flatly; in fact he isn’t exactly sure but he knows it can’t be good and that is close enough, “but I know things about you. Work with me.” 

She looks at him, her eyes hidden by the tinted shades. They glare in the fluorescent lights. She waits for a moment, her hidden eyes searching. “Find something suitable for the occasion. You’ve been a human before.” 

There is a dark jacket, short with long bell sleeves, trimmed in a dyed dark blue fur on the lapel and collar and wrists and hem. It’s Mongolian lamb, but only Edriss knows that. He touches it- it says seven hundred dollars, which is within their budget, and is indicative of Aria’s status as a prestigious and honored member of her profession. The fur indicates nature, the animals she would be well acquainted with. The blue color is exquisite. He imagines luring Elfangor’s son into his limousine with it framing his tanned, thin, Aria hands, and high-cheekboned face. “I thought you were a nature photographer, unless you’ve decided to be Kate Moss,” Edriss says.

Esplin raises his head. “I hardly see how I am comparable to a plant for-” Edriss only shakes her head, hands him less elaborate clothes in dark greens and tans and reds. 

“Look at me,” she says harshly. “Whatever ill-considered thing you’re doing, you’ll go ahead and do it all the same. I know you will.” 

“I need the son of someone important,” he says. This son could be anyone. The Governor’s son, a television celebrity’s son, yet another student. “You know how these human youth are.” She narrows her eyes at him and says nothing. 

Alloran knows. Yes, he’s told him all about it, and Alloran’s voice comes, "when your failures are evident enough to even your people, they will have no need of me, and I will die free, and I will take no issue with this, because I will have heard you scream to your death for three days and nights".

Inside, he screams at Alloran to be quiet with an uncontrolled ferocity he suspects is evident to Edriss, staring right in his face. 

“I know well how things are here,” she says, like a warning, like a test. 

When it comes to it, he is good at being Aria. All the other times he’s been a human, he’s been some vague, unnamed, concept of one. This is his creation, this human who he creates a life for, someone who observes the fascinating animal life of on this Earth, from the Sahara to Siberia, someone who observes the strange but quaint city life, someone who is beautiful for a human- enough to make other humans listen. A human of intrigue, that would draw in a son of Elfangor. But he is not good enough to fix what never had anything to salvage, and Elfangor’s son, some boy who comes from nothing and will go to nothing, doesn’t even understand what he has been told, does not see neither threat nor birthright. 

(Later, much later, when he will find out the real truth about Tobias, he supposes he has to appreciate Elfangor’s son, in a way he will never appreciate Tobias’ friends. It is for the best, he decides, that Edriss never learned the whole truth, and it is for the best that the boy walked out, that he did not take the offer. He could have, he could have not known and walked into it thinking he had a cousin; he could have walked in knowing what was there, attempting to infiltrate while feigning ignorance. Things have not gone well, Esplin will come to realize, and it is not a comfort that they came very close to being worse.)

He never speaks of it again, and Edriss does not ask about it. 

_

"Outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded, hopeless, they will still fight, fight, fight till they are each and every one dead."

She admires them, he can hear and see it plainly, she proudly speaks her perverse reverence, and she is on trial, no less. Esplin cannot even bring himself to gainsay her statements- they could very well be true, he’s seen it be true on occasion, and that is nothing to praise. They will choose their own deaths and she admires them, loves them, and practically is one of them. It is terrible, but he cannot stop thinking about it long after she says it. It is a threat, he thinks. He remembers she told him, see if he can try and take her place, see if he can try and maintain her position, yes, this is what she’s doing now; she knows that her fate is clearly set enough, and she enjoys the idea of his being worse, being lesser, to be ruined by the humans she loves so much that she put herself inside of them for years and years. 

The words don’t leave his head. "Until they are each and every one dead", he keeps remembering to the point where he wonders if Alloran knows how it catches in his mind, the unnatural wrongness of it. 

Yes, maybe it will be true, and maybe it will satisfy her. "Keep waiting, Esplin", he remembers. He will enjoy being rid of her. He needs it.

_

It will be over soon for Edriss 562, who is no longer Visser One. Emperor of Earth, he’d once named her. She is still being held in seclusion, in a cell, so that the last vestiges of information that should not be drawn out in public can be kept discreetly extracted. 

Well, possibly just extracted.

When he came in to where she was kept he told her his own story, to show how she could have done it right if she’d wanted to, if she’d done what he had. But, as he’d said, she couldn’t get enough of it. She was lost in it, lost in her covetousness and desire for whatever it was that humans and their lurid death trap of a planet. A fixation, that was what it became, with whatever it was she saw in her human reflections. To know more about them, to infiltrate so closely, to never stop. 

She leans back her head. He’s seen her do this, he realizes, she’s not sticking up her chin, but tilting backwards, as if she’s in a fast car and she’s letting her hair whip about in the wind. She closes her eyes and opens them slowly, and when he can see them again, one of her cracked, bloodstained lips has turned up. Her face is tired, but in addition, not despite of this, she is ready, she will keep going, like a soldier who knows she will die on a battlefield, and decides to enjoy it the best she can while inflicting the most damage possible, knowing there is nothing she has to lose. The effect is eerie, reminds him of the descriptions of Edriss’ long and debauched and surreal nights as Jenny Lines, near-death rituals. “I see right through you,” she says, her hoarse voice almost mocking. 

She will keep going, he thinks then, and will not stop until the starvation breaks her mind entirely, that is what it will take. "Outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded, hopeless"- it is she who is an Abomination. 

“You see nothing,” he rages, his blade to her head, but she barely notices, “and soon there will be nothing left of you but a memory that will be erased from our hist-”

She shakes her head. “No,” she draws out the word, “your hauteur doesn’t work with me. Do you remember when I told you, see if you can take my position?” Of course he does.

“Yes,” he raises his head, “and now I will.” 

She smiles, then. “Yes, exactly,” she tells him, “and now you have to keep it.” She pauses. “I’ve told you enough about myself, you should know me well, but you don’t. You can, you don’t. You…you must know yourself. But you don’t want to, not all of yourself. I can see it. You can look away from it all you’d like, but when you lay yourself bare one day, you won’t have any choice.”

“You are -”

“And it interests me, your insistence on focusing on whatever you perceive my relation to humanity to be. After you’ve narrated your autobiography to me”- she must be using human terminology to spite him- “and you speak of fixations, of reflections…”

“I can’t understand what this nonsense means, you treacherous, sanctimonious…” he searches for the right word to describe her.

“Then ask your host what I mean, the prize you see in the mirror. You told the both of us a fine story just now.” Even Alloran is quiet now, as if he is surprised. “Ask any of the Andalites, the beautiful, fascinating creatures you needed to have, you needed to see when you looked at yourself…yes,” she says, “I know what I am. I know my methods, my life, who I am, has displeased this society of ours. I am not what it asked for…” he should be further interrogating her, he should be doing something other than listening, than being unable to stop listening, though every second is worse. “But you’re not, either. Sure, you may say they if you took me out of Eva, then you could still take a human out of me, which I wouldn’t justify by answering. But there’s something in you too, something dangerous to yourself. You’re going to keep going. Not until you die, maybe. But until it ruins you.”

“You aren’t a mere liar,” he rages at her, his arms shaking, “it is something far more terrible, that your truth is far worse than any lie.” Alloran is saying something, he’s not sure what it is, he’s trying not to listen, trying to just tell him be quiet, be quiet, there’s nothing for him here, nothing for him anywhere, this has nothing to do with him.

“Yes,” she tells him after a moment, her voice hard and accepting and unflinching, “I’m sure it is, and you had best be prepared.” 

_

She doesn’t go out in the way that was planned but she’s done with all the same, and he takes her place, and already she’s an unpleasant memory, but nothing more. It is a good thing, however it came about, he tells himself. It can be looked at separately from the other events of the day, it must be. He can forget her now and move on. Of course, he is still under his suspended sentence, that came about when she tried to bring him down with her. But she hasn’t done so, not yet, not even along with everything else that was destroyed at the same time as she was.

"My freedom from this life will come", Alloran tells him, but Esplin is in a pleasant enough state, so he just ignores him. He has nothing to respond with anyway.

_

Trojan horse, that’s what it is, thinks Esplin 9466, and says as much, once the humans finally do all that they came to do. A human phrase created to describe a mythic event from their history. He’s spent enough time on that planet to know such things, but he doesn’t waste his time excessively researching them. He must have picked the phrase up from someone; he’s not even sure what “Trojan” describes. But he knows what it means, that it was something terrible and deadly concealed inside, hidden, and it was not confined, and it came out, and caused ruin.

But he is sure of what will befall him now. Two suspended death sentences, both of them for someone of the same rank and position, both of them for letting a planet loose. 

It is not a good thing to accept, but it is the only thing to accept, and there is no fighting it. The humans will get to him first. That will be for the best, and sometimes, the best option is not a good option, but all the same, nothing else can be done. The humans were not exactly outgunned and hopeless, not in his opinion, did not exactly fight until all of them were dead, but the sentiment behind all of that was close enough, their ways, their way of sacrificing themselves, others, anything rather than be taken. He will not go this way, but there is little choice now to accept their ways, whatever they have in store for him. It is better than the alternatives, that no preparation could have helped. 

Something was inside of him, that led to this; something that wasn't controlled, that didn't want control, that didn't look forward or back, or inside, something that was as consuming a revel as raging, coveting desire.

_

At the trial conducted by humans they call him by the name “Visser One.” 

"You want to take my title? We shall see."

It is an unavoidable memory that must be accepted. 

_

“I’m guessing your guards, or the warden, or whoever told you already I was coming.” The lavender box allows the sound of her voice to be heard. The human female youth, however old she is. Old enough to understand by now. He’d already asked if she’d been sent by his old enemies, now just three or four or something like that-he'd heard Elfangor's son disappeared for a time, he truly had loved the she-bear, but apparently they’d all left the planet years ago, to rescue Elfangor’s wide-eyed vengeful brother. All of them except for the girl who survived- she has her own life now. (The human said to him she would be “completely insane” if anyone thought she’d go the Hollywood star now. The crusading son of the crusader host.) At this point, he supposes it doesn’t matter, at least not to him. They are no longer a part of one one another’s lives; that time is done with. They are liberated from one another. What an irony. Liberation without freedom. 

This is probably, he supposes, better than the visits from journalists and writers who want salacious quotes and stories for their tell-all unauthorized biographies (it seems so long ago, so many years back, that he, was visited by one writing about Jake Berenson almost immediately after the trial, he’d screamed at this man until he didn’t even know what he was saying anymore, a mix of his own language and the human’s) or television programs, or whatever else it is they do. There are more than he expected. The military checks them out before they are allowed to come; they turn away some people, he can only imagine what kind. One of his useless lawyers even wanted his words for some memoir. (“You’re asking me for help?” he’d said with his box, laughing mirthlessly, then just laughing because of the absurdity, “have I ruined your miserable, worthless career and now you’ve come back to me because you need me for your salary?”) 

“You know what she was,” he says, enabled to have a technological voice by the box he is imprisoned in. Almost to ask why she would even bother coming, what she seeks. “Do you truly look upon her with sentimentality?” 

“Of course not,” the girl says with a sort of hardness, the hardness of human youth with the kind of freedom that is not liberating. Madra Gervais. He’d never been able to find her. Her brother had been adopted out to a well-off family soon enough after the end of Allison Kim; the girl had not been taken with him and spent her years living...in a way that was very much unlike her brother, and still apparently does. Yet another one of his enemies’ children, fending for themselves in the human world. This time the offspring is looking the past right in its face, demanding he tell everything, and the time of mandated concealment is long over.

He supposes he is liberated from without being free of the memory of Edriss 562 as well. 

Madra doesn’t own formal outfits, she borrowed a dress shirt from a friend’s brother and wore clearance-aisle dress pants she’d found a few days ago, her only dress being very likely unsuitable for this sort of meeting. The prison, when she’d first called them, hadn’t believed who she was until she faxed some information from the town library and recounted her brother’s testimony, broadcast worldwide on television, at the “trial of the century,” her brother, the former host of Astren 764 (to say the very least of what her brother was), who wouldn’t come with her, who barely talks about “all of that” anymore, from the rare correspondences they have had with one another. 

No, she doesn’t see herself as any sort of long-lost heir to a dead empire, nor as a child ripped from a political-martyr mother. But if she did an interview with the New York Times or Sassy or the newsletter of the church on her street, said who she really was, that she wasn’t named for a village in Spain as she tells people if they ask, then enough people would decide she wasn’t human, not really. This is what she came from, this is what she has to know about, or she’ll spend her entire life thinking about it and not being able to stop.

She continues. “I have my judgments of you, too, but I didn’t come here to make them. People already made them.” Yes, evidently. “And besides, say I go on The Late Show tonight, tell them that I came here and why. How long would it be before one of those extremist groups put a hit on me? Before I lost the roof over my head? Before people I know start trying to make money by selling fake stories to the media? Before I ended up in a courthouse suing for the right to legally classify myself as human?” That last one might not be so true, but there’s nothing saying it couldn’t happen these days. Sometimes unprecedented doesn’t mean impossible. “This is my- my thing inside of me,” she says. “I don’t know what to call it. But it’s there.” 

(It always will be, probably, she doesn’t add. Her brother barely talks to her for a reason, he only knows she exists, his unwanted bad-girl of a sister, because he found out when he was made a Controller, and that’s never going to be something that didn’t happen in his life, and California is always going to be the place where he suffered indescribable suffering, so that’s why he moved to rural Vermont and told everyone he knows that he moved from New York. He’s at college, studying art. He goes by the nickname "Dan" in hopes that no one will recognize him from that trial. "What made you think this was a good idea? What the Hell is wrong with you, Madra? You need help", he'd said incredulously over the phone. She didn’t expect him to come. He’s only ever told her basic details, and he told her enough. This is how he protects himself. She doesn’t think what he’s doing, not doing, will protect him, but she doesn’t think anything she can do will, either. And besides, it isn’t a good idea, she knows, but the only idea. It will never go away. And she is free, whatever else she is, and if she wasn’t free she’d spend her life ignoring what will always be there.)

The thing inside, the deadly things inside, made deadlier by its concealment, made deadliest by its nature of being unconstrained. Now that there is nothing left to lose or risk it makes more sense now, Esplin has allowed it to make more sense to him. 

He cannot tell the story of Edriss 562, not the full story, even if he desired to. He has nothing else to do, though, but make sense of what there is. “Yes,” he begins, “I am aware of that.” And he begins.


End file.
